Heavy is the crown
on which she carries.

Nobody sat me down and told me what strength looked like. Nobody gave me a definition or a manual or even a warning. What I got instead were two women — my mother and my grandmother — who simply were strength, so completely and so loudly and so without apology that it was impossible to be in a room with them and not feel it rearranging something inside you. I grew up watching that. Absorbing it. Not knowing that what I was really doing was taking notes I would one day desperately need.

I have never met women quite like them. And I have looked. I have met impressive women, accomplished women, women who carry themselves well and speak with quiet authority. But that particular combination — the flamboyance and the fortitude, the softness and the steel, the way they could light up a room and also hold one together — I have not found that anywhere else. They were singular. And they were mine.

My mother and my grandmother were not the same kind of strong. My grandmother had the quiet, rooted strength — the kind that has been tested so many times it no longer needs to announce itself. My mother was the other kind: outspoken and flamboyant and unapologetically herself in every room she walked into, turning heads not because she was trying to but because she genuinely could not dim herself down and she had stopped trying a long time ago. Together they were something. They complemented each other in ways neither of them probably fully understood — two different expressions of the same extraordinary woman, each one making the other more beautiful just by standing beside her.

I did not fully appreciate what I was witnessing. That is the thing about growing up inside of greatness — you cannot see it clearly when you are small enough to be contained by it. You think this is just what women are. You think everyone's mother carries herself like that. You think strength is ordinary because the people who taught you strength never once let on that it cost them anything.

The bathroom mirror, and the memory I carry like a photograph.

My most vivid memory of my mother is not a holiday or a birthday or a milestone. It is an ordinary evening. Her in my grandmother's bathroom, relaxing her hair — applying the perm herself, the way Black women have always done for each other and for themselves — getting ready to go out with her girlfriends. A whole ritual of becoming. And me, standing at the window, showing all my back teeth, crying.

I did not want her to leave. That is the simple version. But the fuller version is that even then, at whatever age I was standing at that window, I understood something I could not have put into words: that she was going somewhere I could not follow. That there was a version of her — glamorous, free, fully herself — that existed outside of being my mother. And I was not ready to share her with it.

Her friends would laugh about that later. It became their fondest memory of me — the little girl at the window, inconsolable. And I have laughed about it too, across the years. But underneath the laughter is something true that I have only recently been able to name: that bathroom mirror moment was the first time I understood, without words for it, what it looks like when a woman chooses herself. When she gets dressed and does her hair and walks out the door into her own life — and the world does not end, and the people who love her survive it, and she comes home still her.

I was watching a woman practice freedom. I just did not know that is what I was seeing.

What it means to carry what was given to you.

I grew up inside the embodiment of strength, resilience, and self-sufficiency. I did not grow up hearing those words. I grew up watching them — in the way my mother moved through the world, in the way my grandmother held everything together without letting anyone see the seams. It was in my DNA before I had any say in the matter. A inheritance I did not ask for and could not refuse.

The thing about being raised by women like that is that you do not realize you have been given anything. You just absorb it the way you absorb language — without effort, without awareness, without understanding that one day you will need it and will be grateful it is already inside you. You become it before you know you needed to become it.

And then life happened. A failed business — a capital-F Failed business, the kind that was supposed to make me the first millionaire in my family, and instead made me intimate with the specific humiliation of a dream that collapses publicly. A move from Chicago to New York that was less a fresh start and more a necessity — the city I ran to when the city I built in could no longer hold me. And the realization, slow and then all at once, that I was now the woman in the mirror. That the strength I had watched my whole life was now the thing I was being asked to produce. Quietly. On my own. Without anyone standing at the window watching me and crying.

Nobody tells you that part. Nobody warns you that the strength you admired in other people will one day become the expectation placed on you. That the resilience you grew up around is not just a trait you witnessed — it is a standard you will be held to, by life if not by people. That one day you will be someone else's bathroom mirror moment, someone else's first lesson in what it looks like when a woman keeps going.

What strength actually looks like — from the inside.

From the outside, strength looks like a woman who has it together. Who handles things. Who does not fall apart in public. Who keeps moving even when the moving is hard. That is what people see. That is what they remember. That is what becomes the story — she was so strong, she never let it break her.

From the inside, it looks like this: you do what has to be done because there is no one else to do it. You carry what is yours to carry because putting it down is not an option anyone offered you. You smile in the right moments and fall apart in private and get back up the next morning and do it again. You do not feel strong. You feel tired. You feel the weight of the crown more than you feel the beauty of it. But you wear it anyway, because that is what was modeled for you, and because somewhere inside the exhaustion is a quiet thing that sounds a lot like dignity.

My mother never looked like she was struggling in that bathroom mirror. My grandmother never let the cracks show. And I understand now that this was not performance — it was protection. Theirs. Mine. A way of moving through the world that says: I am not available to be diminished. I am not available to be pitied. I will be beautiful in this, even if the beautiful is hard-won and heavy and costs me things you will never know about.

I am still learning to carry it gracefully. Still figuring out which parts of their strength to take and which parts to put down — the parts that protected them but might be limiting me, the parts that kept things together but also kept the softness out. Still asking myself where self-sufficiency ends and isolation begins. Still trying to let people in while the voice in my head that sounds like both of them says: you do not need anyone to hold you up.

But I am grateful. I am grateful for the window and the mirror and the perm and the girlfriends and the bathroom that smelled like something was being transformed. I am grateful I got to watch two extraordinary women be exactly who they were. I am grateful that what I thought was just my childhood was actually a curriculum — a long, slow, beautiful education in what it means to be a woman who does not fold.

They did not know they were teaching me. That is the thing about women like them — they are not performing strength for an audience. They are just living it. And the watching is the gift. The watching is the whole inheritance.

Heavy is the crown on which she carries. But she carries it. And I am beginning to understand — slowly, imperfectly, and with more grace than I give myself credit for — that I was always going to carry mine too. I just needed to grow into it first.